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Cont: [ED] Discussion: Trans Women are not Women (Part 5)

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Collin237 said:
Otherwise, it's her own opinion, and since she appears to be distressed by requests for her to define it, it's not anyone's business to pry.
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That's a load of crap. She decided to come specifically to a skeptics forum to make claims of fact, some of them squarely within biological science, and attempted arguments for such. Of course she's going to be asked to define her terms, because she explicitly rejected the mainstream dictionary definitions when it was pointed out they made her claims evaluate to false. One would think Lithuanian philosophers would know about the need for defining one's terms in trying to determine the truth-value of propositions or validity of arguments.
 
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Collin237 said:
Defining 'woman' as either having a female anatomy, or having an illusion of female anatomy reasonably consistent with the diagnosis of gender dysphoria.
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To echo ThePrestige's comments in a slightly different form, you are saying that having an illusion makes the thing real. I will also not that you would have to add one more clause for completeness. You would have to say, "has female anatomy, or has the illusion of female anatomy, and has no illusion of male anatomy." You have to make sure transmen are not included in your "woman" definition.

There is a different problem with your statement, though, which has been alluded to before. Transwomen do not believe that they have female anatomy. They believe that they are women despite having male anatomy.


I heard a transman on the Moth Radio Hour telling "his" story about the experience of giving birth. He/she described the decision to get pregnant, the change in hormones that allowed it, and, all through it "he" insisted that he remained a man. He knew very much that his anatomy was female and that he could conceive, carry, and deliver a child.

You'll note that I treated "his" pronouns a little bit differently. There's only so much leeway I'll grant on the pronoun thing. If you are pregnant, you're a woman, in my humble opinion. It's a definition thing. I'll keep saying it until someone provides me with an alternate definition that doesn't suffer from the flaws previously noted.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
It would be easier to sort people into clear groups using unambiguous, binary criteria, but that's not proof that doing so is a morally just or socially wise course of action.

I agree that the existence of trans people makes the issue of gender much more complicated. The existence of challenging data doesn't mean we dismiss that data as invalid. It would be easier to just dismiss trans people as mentally ill perverts, but that just betrays an aversion to nuance and an unwillingness to adapt older models of social structure to deal with observed reality.

Yes, there's a difference between a butch lesbian and a trans man, and it's not easy to cut clean, straight lines on what constitutes the female gender.

It's important to note that a desire to deny the validity of individual experience that contradicts established social structures is often the root of tremendous oppression.

The entire history of LGBT activism is to point out that people that exist outside the heteronormative standard exist, and their identity is valid and worthy of respect.
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Exactly this.

As you alluded to, not so very long ago it was received wisdom that homosexuality was nothing more than a social/mental deviancy. "It's not natural or normal for a man to be sexually attracted purely to other men" went the message. And all such people should either be treated with sympathy medically with the aim of "curing" them of this deviancy, or they should be eschewed and avoided by "normal" society (depending on one's social, political or religious leanings).

As I see it, the big failing driving intolerance/misunderstanding of transgender identity and gender dysphoria is pretty much the same one that drove intolerance/misunderstanding of homosexuality (right up until a couple of decades ago in the mainstream): "these people do not fit with my own personal experience and my own understanding of "normal", so therefore by definition their (claimed) lived experience cannot be either valid or true".

And (IMO) central to the manifestation of this in the case of attitudes to gender dysphoria etc is set of beliefs - borne of societal conditioning - which many people come to treat as more-or-less axiomatic and inviolable: that gender is 1) fixed and immutable, and 2) inflexibly tied to (and effectively interchangeable with) biological sex, and 3) for any person to claim otherwise must be either mentally ill or lying.

So a person born as a biological male inhabits the gender "man" for the whole of his life, and likewise for female/woman. To me, this is an extremely similar situation as was in place when mainstream societal conditioning used to hold the axiomatic belief that men are sexually attracted to women and vice-versa - and that anyone claiming otherwise must be either mentally ill or lying.

However we then reach an intermediate stage - which is where I believe much of society (and many within these threads) currently sits - in which the view is along the lines of "well, even though it goes against everything I think I know about human behaviour/conditioning, I'm prepared to accept that some people really are that way.... and what those people choose to believe/do in their own personal lives should be their own concern.... and I'm prepared to make allowances for those people within society.... but I'm still not prepared to believe or state that those people's lived conditions are equally as valid as my own.... and I'll be damned if we "normal" people are going to give any ground wrt our own rights/protections/lifestyles/etc in order to accommodate such people".

So here we are.....
 
theprestige said:
Friendly reminder for LondonJohn, as a lot has happened in the last few days, and I don't want this to get missed.
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Oh, I already addressed this question. But likewise, maybe I'll ask you:

Please provide me with links to the academic or medical material that you think gives the most eloquent and exhaustive explanation for why "option 3" - transwomen just using the men's facilities - should be the solution. Thanks!
 
Meadmaker said:
There is a different problem with your statement, though, which has been alluded to before. Transwomen do not believe that they have female anatomy. They believe that they are women despite having male anatomy.
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Firstly, there's a big difference between a sensory illusion and a belief.

Secondly, being trans is not a belief. It's a condition, essentially a common term for gender dysphoria. Most trans women claim they are women for political purposes, but that doesn't constitute belief.
 
Meadmaker said:
Curiously absent from your link is any definition of "man" or "woman". Also absent is any statement that would depend on such a definition, such as a statement that "transwomen are women".
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Seriously? We're this far into these threads, and you're asking for somebody who is in favour of transgender identity recognition and rights to provide a definition of "man" and "woman" within the context of gender dysphoria? Really?

For your education, try this link out:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/envi...isthedifferencebetweensexandgender/2019-02-21
 
Meadmaker said:
There is a different problem with your statement, though, which has been alluded to before. Transwomen do not believe that they have female anatomy. They believe that they are women despite having male anatomy.
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Yeah, it falls apart under the slightest scrutiny, but at least I think it's the first time in all these parts we've actually gotten a formally proper definition that makes "transwomen are women" true. At least in as much as one defines "transwoman" as "someone of the male sex who believes to be of the female sex and was diagnosed with gender dysphoria." So there's that, I guess.
 
caveman1917 said:
I don't care whether it is morally just or socially wise. This is a skeptics forum, I care whether it is sound reasoning. And there just isn't a proper definition of "woman" to make the claim "transwomen are women" true, without that definition also entailing a bunch of other claims. It is what it is. If you want to make a moral or social argument, then the claim should be "transwomen should be treated as women" or something like that.
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"I don't care whether it is morally just or socially wise. This is a skeptics forum, I care whether it is sound reasoning. And there just isn't a proper definition of "gay man" to make the claim "gay men are genuinely sexually attracted to men" true, without that definition also entailing a bunch of other claims. It is what it is. If you want to make a moral or social argument, then the claim should be "gay men should be treated as people who are sexually attracted to men" or something like that."


(For the avoidance of doubt: the above paragraph in italics is not my actual belief - quite the opposite, in fact. It's a literary device to show deficiencies in the post to which I'm responding here)
 
Elaedith said:
I linked to a video interview with Dr Soh in an earlier thread episode. She gives a very good overview of the negative effects of ideological interference in science (the reason she is no longer in academia).
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As I recall, at certain points in history, a fair few academics also cited "the negative effects of ideological interference in science" when it came to the recognition of gay rights and black civil rights....
 
Collin237 said:
Firstly, there's a big difference between a sensory illusion and a belief.
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No there isn't. In the sense of belief being any proposition considered true, not necessarily a consciously chosen belief. For example "I am perceiving this particular sensory information" constitutes a belief

Secondly, being trans is not a belief. It's a condition, essentially a common term for gender dysphoria. Most trans women claim they are women for political purposes, but that doesn't constitute belief.
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Of course it is a belief, it's a set of propositions considered true by the person in question.
 
LondonJohn said:
"I don't care whether it is morally just or socially wise. This is a skeptics forum, I care whether it is sound reasoning. And there just isn't a proper definition of "gay man" to make the claim "gay men are genuinely sexually attracted to men" true, without that definition also entailing a bunch of other claims. It is what it is. If you want to make a moral or social argument, then the claim should be "gay men should be treated as people who are sexually attracted to men" or something like that."
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You realize we just discussed the difference between the claim "transwomen genuinely believe to be women" and "transwomen are women" above, right? You know, the part about where the brain state argument only supports the former and not the latter?:rolleyes:

(For the avoidance of doubt: the above paragraph in italics is not my actual belief - quite the opposite, in fact. It's a literary device to show deficiencies in the post to which I'm responding here)
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You're showing deficiencies alright, I'll give you that.
 
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Collin237 said:
Firstly, there's a big difference between a sensory illusion and a belief.

Secondly, being trans is not a belief. It's a condition, essentially a common term for gender dysphoria. Most trans women claim they are women for political purposes, but that doesn't constitute belief.
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Good. So, in the future you will not use the word "illusion" in definitions related to transgenderism.

But they don't believe that they have female anatomy, either. In other words, your definition, posted previously, by you, would be incorrect whether it used "illusion" or "belief". So, your definitiion of "woman" doesn't work.
 
caveman1917 said:
If you define "woman" by a person showing feminine behaviour (due to a switch in their brain or otherwise) then there are, by definition, no unfeminine women.
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That's not the definition of "woman" - as it applies in the context of gender dysphoria and transgender studies - that is in generally-accepted usage within medical/sociological/legislative fields.

I think it may be better, and more instructive to the debate, to stick to the terms/definitions which are in generally-accepted usage by the real-world experts and legislators.... rather than trying to interrogate individual posters in an online forum as to how they think that terms are defined.
 
caveman1917 said:
That's a load of crap. She decided to come specifically to a skeptics forum to make claims of fact, some of them squarely within biological science, and attempted arguments for such. Of course she's going to be asked to define her terms, because she explicitly rejected the mainstream dictionary definitions when it was pointed out they made her claims evaluate to false. One would think Lithuanian philosophers would know about the need for defining one's terms in trying to determine the truth-value of propositions or validity of arguments.
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I just looked up Boudicca in the member list. Scrolling through her posts, I see that she is a Communist and a member of the DSA. Based on that, I'm stipulating that her claims probably are crap. My grandmother was a Communist when she was young, but she disavowed that label when she found out that Stalin was in league with Hitler. It's become apparent in the last few years that this "red-brown alliance" is resurgent. So yes, Boudicca has lost my support.
 
Meadmaker said:
If someone claims, X is an A, then I want a definition of A. Otherwise, the statement is meaningless.
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But, you might ask, why does it matter?

Because the real issue is deciding social policy, such as whether a given high school student is allowed to compete on the girls' track team.


If your only justification for that is "because she is a girl", then you have to provide a definition of "girl". I have such a definition, but if that definition is used, then certain people who have recently been allowed to compete as girls would no longer be allowed.

In other words, the statement "transwomen are women" are used as justification, indeed the only justification, for allowing them in areas or categories restricted to women. That is something that depends, specifically, on the definition. So yes, seriously, it matters.

I say that Rachel McKinnon should not be competing as a cyclist in the Women's division. If you want to argue against that, present an argument for why she ought to be allowed that does not depend on "because she's a woman." Alternatively, present a definition of "woman" that includes Rachel McKinnon.
 
LondonJohn said:
Seriously? We're this far into these threads, and you're asking for somebody who is in favour of transgender identity recognition and rights to provide a definition of "man" and "woman" within the context of gender dysphoria? Really?

For your education, try this link out:

https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/envi...isthedifferencebetweensexandgender/2019-02-21
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It didn't contain anything in the proper form, sorry.

caveman1917 said:
Provide your definition 3c in the proper form: "Defining 'woman' as ..." where you fill in the dots.
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caveman1917 said:
You realize we just discussed the difference between the claim "transwomen genuinely believe to be women" and "transwomen are women" above, right? You know, the part about where the brain state argument only supports the former and not the latter?:rolleyes:
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Yes. Yes I do realise that.

Maybe this will help you understand why what you're stating is both wrong and offensive:

We are discussing the difference between the claim "gay males genuinely believe (themselves) to be sexually attracted solely to males" and "gay males are sexually attracted solely to males". You know, the part about where the brain state argument only supports the former and not the latter?:rolleyes:



You're showing deficiencies alright, I'll give you that.
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Really? Hmmmmmmmm
 
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